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Trouble Appending Subtool Dupe - Mac ZB 3.2 issue

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I’ve been working on this character for a while now and it’s come time to dupe the glove and boot, but for some unknown reason I am unable to do it with this particular model. I have no problem with other models of mine, but something is different with this character.

I clone the tool which then appears in the tool palate. I append the cloned subtool to the model and it adds it to the subtool palate, but the tool icon in the palate is blank and the tool itself does not appear on the model. No polys are hidden or flipped. When I mouseover the cloned subtool, it shows that the tool contains the same polycount as the original, but it just doesn’t show up on the model. Very weird.

I’m running ZBrush 3.2 on a quad core Mac with 6 MB RAM at work and an 8 core Mac at home with 4 GB RAM. I get the same problem with each machine. I get this problem with every subtool on the model, but I’ve only included one subtool ( a low poly glove) in this attached zip file.

edit - I forgot to mention that I have tried to export the subtools as obj and dxf to import into another app like Modo or Lightwave, but they don’t appear there either.

Any ideas on a solution would be greatly appreciated.

#2

kracken, i’m using 3.5r3 on windows, but checked your mesh, it does some funky stuff, kept locking up zbrush.
i was able to get it to mirror by using subtool master, HOWEVER, the minute you append ANYTHING to that tool it locks up or diappears. this happens even if you don’t mirror it, just by appending anything.
i tried to polymesh it and export, nothing cept a crash on reimport. also tried a extraction, same thing.
A trick that did work:
i rigged it for retopology, and added the same mesh(not cloned) as topology and made a adaptive skin, that seems to be fine. so thats a workaround.

#3

Try this:

  1. In the Tool>Export submenu, set Scale to 1, and XYZ Offsets to 0.
  2. Export the mesh as an OBJ, then immediately import the same OBJ.
  3. Try cloning and so on.
#4

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried it, but when I go to import the obj, I get an error “Error encountered while importing a file.”

I wonder if the file is corrupt somehow? But the ZTL file opens fine in ZB. It’s when I try to clone and append the subtools or export objs that I’m getting these weird errors.

#5

Spaceboy, yep, I’ve tried all of those things except for that last part which seemed to work. Thanks a lot! Saved me from having to recreate the whole thing!

#6

Fix to append new subtools in ZB 3.2:

when you append a new tool, it becomes invisible, in order to correct that, select the invisible tool in your subtool tab, then go to Edit, you will see you can undo 1 step, so just do so and the visibility of your tool will come back.

Fix to export OBJ:

Check your tool>export scale options.

If x,y, and z are set to “nan”, simply drag the slider away from the center, and back to center. It will switch from nan to 0. This happens w/ GoZ sometimes. Having x,y, and z all set to nan essentially exports every single vert of your model on the origin point, which makes the model not visible in the external app.

#7

excuse my ignorance but what is “nan”?

#8

It stands for ‘not a number’. Basically it means that for some reason the value hasn’t been set correctly.

#9

thanks, i ended up googling it too. i didn’t know zbrush could do that.

#10

Appreciate all the suggestions!

Yruama, never even knew about subtools being invisible. Thanks! Worked like a charm. This helps a great deal!

#11

Yruama, thank you very much for that workaround! :slight_smile: I had the same problem with invisible SubTool on OSX32r2 (as soon as I appended a SubTool it disappeared right after I started editing it and then every SubTool disappeared the same way…)

#12

If a SubTool becomes invisible like that, simply make sure that it’s selected in the Tool>SubTool menu and then click Edit>Tool Undo. It will become visible again.

#13

Thanks aurick,

I also discovered that if a SubTool of a freshly opened Tool becomes invisible it may have no Undo… so, I reopened it and in Tool/Export changed the values from ‘nun’ to 1 (for scale) and 0 (for Offset X/Y/Z)

I just checked and it looks like all my Tools that had ‘invisible SubTool issue’ had ‘nun’ values in Tool/Export…